Believe It or Not, a Shortage of Oddities Bedevils Ripley's

By

Sarah Nassauer

Updated June 16, 2009 11:59 p.m. ET

After 34 years of labor, Scott Weaver, a 49-year-old manager in the produce department of Lucky Supermarket in Rohnert Park, Calif., finished the model of San Francisco he had constructed entirely of toothpicks.

At the Sonoma County Fair, the sculpture won rave reviews -- not least for the built-in track that allows ping-pong balls to roll past city landmarks.

In Florida, Edward Meyer, vice president of exhibits and archives at Ripley Entertainment Inc., noticed a YouTube video of the sculpture. He dispatched a local employee from the Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum in San Francisco to offer $10,000 on the spot for the piece.

"Right now, it's my holy grail," says Mr. Meyer, who upped his offer to $40,000 in April, without any luck.

Mr. Meyer spends much of his time pining for objects like Mr. Weaver's toothpick sculpture. These are what in Ripley's parlance are called "A exhibits" -- those odd, one-of-a-kind, often interactive items that can anchor the rest of a museum collection.

Over the past four years, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, a unit of Jim Pattison Group's Ripley Entertainment Inc., has been on an expansion binge. It opened big new museums in New York, London, San Antonio and Bangalore, India. Four more are to open by mid-2010, in Veracruz, Mexico; Bahrain; Jeju, South Korea; and Surfer's Paradise, Australia.

As a result, the company says, it is for the first time in its history facing a shortage of A-list oddities on par with the portrait of Barack Obama made of 12,000 gum balls in New York, the three shrunken heads on display in London and the vampire-killing kit from the mid-1800s at the Tennessee museum.

"We have 10% of what we had just two years ago" because the company's stockpile has been nearly emptied to fill the new museums, says Tim O'Brien, vice president of communications at Ripley Entertainment. "We are in search for at least 200 A exhibits to replenish our supply and meet our current needs," he says.

But finding and buying large amounts of weird art, shrunken heads or Hollywood memorabilia while staying within budget isn't easily rushed.

Ripley's Believe or Not Museums are expanding so quickly that they're facing a shortage of vampire killing kits, two-headed animals and celebrity hair. How many shrunken heads can there be in the world? Sarah Nassauer reports.

Consider shrunken heads. Every Ripley's museum must have one, and private collectors still covet them, but so far as experts can tell, no one is still making them. Mr. Meyer says that when he started working in acquisitions at Ripley's 31 years ago, the preserved human heads slightly larger than a fist could be bought for between $500 and $5,000.

"Today, you probably can't buy a fake one for $5,000," he says. A high-quality shrunken head -- one used for authentic tribal purposes, with long hair and decorative elements -- now costs about $50,000.

Outlawed for more than half a century now, ceremonial head shrinking was believed by its practitioners to trap the avenging spirit of a murdered adversary. After killing a foe, the Shuar tribe in a remote area of Ecuador took heads, skinned them, boiled the skin, sewed the skin back up, closed the mouth with wooden pegs, heated the head with rocks and sand, and then smoked it until it was cured. In the early 1900s, heads became currency to buy guns from Western visitors, increasing the practice. A case of head shrinking hasn't been documented for decades.

The heads are popular among a small group of avid collectors who are often willing to pay more than Ripley's.

"You could count the number of players on both hands in this country," says Jay Conrad, a retired roofing contractor in Lakeland, Tenn. He says he bought his first shrunken head in 1983 for $500 and has owned dozens over the years. "I'm interested in the dark side of human behavior," he says.

Last year, he says, he sold a head to another collector for $40,000.

For deformed animals, another Ripley's signature museum piece, Mr. Meyer stays in touch with Paul Springer, a 66-year-old livestock farmer in Mineral Point, Wis., who has bought and cared for freak animals as a hobby since the mid-1970s. "People just know to give me a call if an animal is born with deformities," says Mr. Springer.

Supplies are limited. A six-legged calf, for example, is "about one in four million born alive," Mr. Springer says. He has sold about six animals to Ripley's to be stuffed and displayed.

To keep inventory flowing, Mr. Meyer works to keep rivals as suppliers. A perennial associate is Billy Jamieson, a Toronto art dealer with a penchant for macabre tribal art and black button-up shirts who is known to pay top dollar for a good shrunken head or other mummified oddity. Though Mr. Jamieson is a threat to certain deals, "I value him as a friend much more then I fear him as a competitor," Mr. Meyer says.

Plenty of people want to sell their oddities to Ripley's. Mr. Meyer and his assistant, Anthony Scipio, receive dozens of pitches a week for headliner exhibits. Most just don't rate as A exhibits, or can't be bought at the right price.

Like a large-scale drawing of the Sultan of Oman made from a single, continuous line. It's one among many museum hopefuls detailed in a stack of papers in Mr. Meyer's office at Ripley's Orlando headquarters.

"A Ripley's customer doesn't care about the Sultan of Oman," Mr. Meyer says. "It's a C-plus, not an A. If it was Elvis, it might be an A."

A table and chairs set for afternoon tea covered in dry tea falls short. "I thought it was actually made of tea, but it's just covered in it," Mr. Meyer says.

The recession is one bright spot. More people are willing to sell in a down economy, and "it's easier to negotiate," he says.

Ripley's also displays some fakes. The company owns two authentic iron maidens, coffin-like medieval torture devices that killed people with inward-pointing iron spikes affixed to the interior walls. But it displays replicas in 17 museums. Mr. Meyer estimates that only 10 real ones exist in the world, and he knows of only two others, owned by wealthy individuals, one in Portugal and one in France.

"I follow those people in case they want to sell them," Mr. Meyer says. But facsimiles have to fill the gap, because "you can't have a big medieval torture display" without an iron maiden. The replicas are clearly marked as such, he says.

Mr. Meyer's favorite purchase of 2008 is a one-tenth scale replica of the Challenger space shuttle made of about half a million splints (matchsticks with no heads). It took the artist about 13 years to build and nine more to decide to sell.

"At first I wanted to do money-raising stuff" for charities in honor of the crew killed, says 60-year-old Ken Applegate, but nothing panned out. Eventually, he says, a divorce and damage from a hurricane around his Hudson, Fla., home in 2004 persuaded him to sell the sculpture. He called Mr. Meyer. Neither party will disclose the price.

Mr. Meyer is hopeful that Mr. Weaver, the San Francisco toothpick sculptor, will eventually come around, but the artist is attached to his work. "Some people threw toothpicks at me and my wife when we got married instead of rice," Mr. Weaver says. And, he worries, "if something broke on it, who would fix it?"

This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.